What's a book that fundamentally changed the way you thought about something/life?

Hello. I was doing icebreakers at an event and we had to ask people about books that had an impact on them. I forgot the exact phrasing, but I think it was something about a book that changed your outlook on life or thought process in a significant way. In my opinion, good books make you think and this was one of those questions that had the same impact. I'll go first: Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. They made it into a movie but I strongly preferred the book. It (not gonna go into detail because it can be a touchy subject) was an issue that I hadn't really thought about, but it changed my perspective. A notable quote: "Each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done." I had always struggled with forgiving those who had wronged me, but thinking about it through this lens helped me to realize that the person who did something bad is not necessarily just bad. Anyways, does anyone else have an experience with a book that did that for you? I'm curious about how this group (permies) specifically would answer this question.

The Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Milman (sp) when I was 19... the book NOT the movie.

Norman Vincent Peal and his wife's books on positive thinking clanged my life and my way of thinking.

Dr Wayne Dyers books also.

As a teen I read the books of Carlos Castaneda and was enchanted.
Later I read books by Paolo Coelho and I was hooked.
In my early thirties I read Plant Spirit Medicine by Eliot Cowan ... and I was frequently crying of recognition; I was home.

The Dharma Bums changed the way I looked at life (I was like 16); I didn't know such deep and breathless joy was even possible.  The Complete Tightwad Gazette (a gag gift for my 18th birthday, but the joke was on them) changed the way I look at money and running a household.

Wow, this is a great question. I typically will read books several times. I seem to get something new every time, even reference books.

I would say with anything there is some of the "eat the watermelon and spit out the seeds" philosophy. While I can really enjoy a book, I have never found myself in absolute agreement with everything in it. I think that may be the case with all of us, except the author of the book.

Paradigm shifts, related to spirituality/community/environment, occurred after reading and contemplating:

Wendell Berry. Most everything he writes but the one that really stands out is his essay: Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community
Skeeter Wilson - Take Nothing With You
Frank Laubach - You are My Friends

I am posting a link to the last one because it is one of those books that is cheap on the author's website but ridiculous on other websites.

https://www.newreaderspress.com/You-are-My-Friends

Nina Surya wrote:Later I read books by Paolo Coelho and I was hooked.

Yes, I second that. I have read a few and they are enjoyable.

"Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance" is life changing.  It isn't a read-it-once kind of book.  I've read it half a dozen times or more, and each time I understand a little further into the book.  It starts out an easy read and gets deeper and deeper into the subject of "quality", what it is, and how to define it.  The deeper you look, the harder it is to answer what seems a simple question on the surface.  I found it truly profound.

Man, this is a neat question. I've been mulling this over -- thinking up book after book and then rejecting each because surely something must be more foundational.

I guess, tentatively, I'm going with Summerhill: a radical approach to child rearing. I was maybe 19 and in a period of questioning why my parents didn't raise me with a more anarchic philosophy of child-rearing when my mom got me a copy of this book. It floored me. It lead me on to find and explore the Sudbury Valley School philosophy and related trends. This book and all that followed, shaped how I raised my children and steered me into studying education at university and then rejecting education as a profession.



Maybe I'll come back and amend this if I come up with something else.

I'll list three, and what area of thought the books changed.

1. After a lifetime of studying science, Against Method by  Paul Feyerabend.  This is a serious 1968 philosophical work by a heavyweight thinker that directly challenges the popular notion of "science" as a coherent and omni-rational  intellectual philosophy.  Whenever I am discussing scientific issues with someone who has not read it, I regard them the same way I would as someone who is talking about the classics but hasn't read The Odyssey.  

2. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. Changed the nature of how I see adversity, personal challenges, my own mistakes, and the value of permaculture practices. This work has fallen out of favor because some people don't like descriptions of reality, but no dark cloud crosses my mental horizon without a reminder of Crusoe's ability to find silver linings anywhere, anytime.

3. Howdie Mickoski's  Exit the Cave. Direct talk about a sensitive subject, often clouded by sentimentalism, logical fallacies, programming, and propaganda.  I wouldn't pick this one up if you think that a loving god would strike children with bone cancer, or if you think you are here to learn lessons but are memory wiped before birth, or think that people voluntarily choose to experience lives of trauma and pain.  However, if you are able to look beyond the programming of religion and the pabulum of the "New Age', Mickoski might appeal to you.  

Good thread.
Thanks OP, and to the others that have contributed.

"Pain, the Gift Nobody Wants" By Paul Brand. It was also republished with a new title: The Gift of Pain.  

Really changed my view of hardship and discomfort.  Written by a medical doctor working in a leper colony in India.

Zero To One by Peter Thiel.

Changed my life.

"Walden" by Henry Thoreau. It made me value the really important things in life. And " The Capital" by Karl Marx, not because of his socialism or communism, but because of his view of what capitalism is and how a few people make most of the decisions about our material living conditions, even if some of those few people don't want to make those decisions. It is really an eye opening book.

This was a thought-provoking question.  I've been stewing on it since it was posted, and I've thought of a few.  In rough time order:

In junior high school and early high school, I read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy, some good, some not so good.  But, I did read a lot of Robert Heinlein, which probably planted the seeds of my libertarian leanings, especially "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress".

In high school, my chemistry teacher's first assignment for us was to read "Inherit the Stars", by James P. Hogan, which is sci-fi about the scientific method, and its use or lack thereof, and what happens if you discard discordant data and outliers.   Later, I read both Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolution" and "Conjectures and Refutations" by Karl Popper.  These go to the heart of epistemology: how do we know what we know, do we really know what we think we know, what are limits of human knowledge, what level or certitude of "knowing" is sufficient to be useful?  Kuhn's "true enough" model of science is more useful in day-to-day life than Poppers "not yet disproven".  Philosophically, Popper is correct about the limits of human knowledge, but where the rubber actually meets the road, Kuhn rules the day - at least in my opinion.

Slightly out of time order, but thematically related, is "Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy" by Moore, which is amazing if you care about generating mechanical precision from scratch.  This is closely related to the epistemological questions in the above books.

My high school chemistry teacher also turned me on to james Gleick's "Chaos", about the behavior of systems with recursion or feedback loops.  Even trivially simple equations can lead to "chaos" - behavior that, if simply observed, would be indistinguishable from random noise.  Tweak a gain parameter slightly, and the system may settle back down into predictably cyclical behavior.  Tweak it back - chaos!  This book also describes and gives many examples of fractals, in layman's terms.  Later, I read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "Fooled by Randomness", in which he explains, among other things, that if a system's underlying random generator function is sufficiently non-Gaussian (not a classic bell curve) - Levy alpha-stable is one example given - then the "skewness" of that distribution  ("long tails" is the common way of describing such a distribution) may preclude the useful employment of the standard statistical tools.  That is, the first moment (average) may be computable for some sample set of the onserved data, but the underlying distribution itself has an undefined first moment - the "average" doesn't even exist - so the sample mean is useless for understanding the actual system's behavior.  Thus, anything built on computed averages, standard deviations and the like will be on a foundation of quicksand if the underlying distribution is sufficiently "wild".  This also has bearing on things like whether short-term variations from some computed "average" - say, ambient temperature, or rainfall - are meaningful in the way commonly conceived, or whether the  erratic and sometimes wild excursions from whatever anchor or baseline condition we use as a reference (typically, something within our own lifespans) might simply be the result of non-linear dynamics in complex interconnected systems with feedback.  Along these same lines (modeling from observed data), Pandit's "Data Dependent Systems" is worth a look - attempting to empirically fit successively more complicated models to measured data in a systematic and objective way.  However, Pandit's method does rely on assumptions about the underlying distribution(s) - true enough, no doubt in many mechanical systems, but for things like asset pricing (among his chosen examples), which are as much a function of human psychology ("fear and greed") as anything, this may not be a good assumption.  So, beware.

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's "On Growth and Form" is now somewhat deprecated, but is still absolutely enchanting, showing that simple mathematical (geometrical) transformations can alter one identifiable species of plant or animal into the shape of another.

Back in my sci-fi days, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy - "Red Mars", "Green Mars" and "Blue Mars" - made me think about terra forming, and whether human efforts at modifying the landscape can have positive effects.  Obviously, I believe that we can, else I wouldn't be here at permies, but I also believe that we should play "small ball" - experiment in our own back yards - rather than trying to do grand projects to alter global-scale behavior, as Robinson entertains.

George Hauk's "The Aqueduct of Nemausus" first made me appreciate the importance of project management in engineering and construction efforts, in a very readable fictionalized telling of the construction of the aqueduct that fed the Roman colony at what is today Nimes, France.

"A Pattern Language" by Christopher Alexander is amazing, but I still haven't figured out how to really make use of it.  It's still too big for me to get my (mental) arms around it.

Joseph Jenkin's "The Humanure Handbook" made me think differently about disposing of human "waste" and of closing nutrient cycles.  This followed on the heels of King's "Farmers of 40 Centuries".

Jaques Heyman's translation of Coulomb's "Memoir on Statics" helped my to understand what makes masonry arches, vaults and domes stay up - or collapse.  If you read French, you can go straight to Coulomb, but my French is rusty enough that Heyman is very helpful.  It also explains why ancient and medieval masons could simply size up scale models of structures and have something that would (in general) work, given adequate foundations, etc. (and why you can, too!).

Chris Schwartz's "Anarchist" series - "Anarchist's Tool Chest", "Anarchist's Workbench", and "Anarchist's Design Book" - have helped me to see how to build enduring furniture with simple (and cheap) hand tools.  A few power tools can make the process a bit quicker - maybe a band saw, table saw, and thickness planer will remove some of the "bull work"of breaking down and roughing the stock to size - but hand tools can work.  Now, my hands need to learn what my head knows - learn by doing.  As you may guess, this is a common theme - a flaw - with me.

Hermann Phleps book on log construction (I have the English translation by MacGregor titled  "The Craft of Log Building", but the German original is published as "Der Blockbau") is growing on me, and has made me contemplate how best to build enduring wooden structures.  I also have a bunch of timber framing books, most of which are good, but none of which I can say stand out head-and-shoulders above the rest.  I'd like to pick up a copy of Phleps "Allemannische Holzbaukunst" - roughly, "German Timber Framing" - because i suspect it will be the equal of his log construction book, but it is uncheap, used or otherwise.  "The Craft of Log Building" is not a construction manual; if that's what you're looking for, look elsewhere.  It's more an encyclopedia of traditional methods and techniques, with examples of what worked poorly (structures only a couple of hundred years old) and what worked well (structures many hundreds of years old), and why that might have been so in a particular context.  Lots of Permie-friendly stuff in there - cannot recommend it highly enough if you are interested in log construction, or traditional timber construction, generally.  Everything from harvesting trees to building sod roofs, it's in there.  I really ought to do a review of this book, once I figure out how to do that properly on this forum.

Glen Fritz's "The Lost Sea of the Exodus" helped me to understand how something as basic as regional geographical knowledge might be ignored and forgotten, even though it is plainly visible to anyone who cares to look.

Edmund Storms's "The Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions" was a good summation of the rather bumpy experimental efforts to confirm (replicate) the effects of "cold fusion", first made widely known by Pons and Fleischmann (and the University of Utah press conference circus), though the antecedents of occasionally observed weirdness in electrochemical cells went back to at least the 1920s.  I am doubtful that any current theory of what is happening is "true enough" to adequately encompass the totality of experimental observations (I'd conjecture that there is more than one mechanism at work, and that nature is more wild and wonderful than we at first appreciate), but Storms is still a good overview, even if he advocates for his own viewpoint.  This also made me realize how political (even corrupt) science funding has become.

David Lyle's "The Book of Masonry Stoves" changed my notions of space heating (or, as it turns out, people heating).  This lead me to rocket stoves and bench heating and sucked me into the Permies forums, even though I'd had a passing acquaintance with permaculture, previously (</sarc on> "Lucky you!" </sarc off>).

"The Transmission of Epidemic Influenza" by Edgar Hope-Simpson made me re-think my mental model of seasonal influenza (which is not a trivial consideration for those of us who live at high latitudes in the northern hemisphere).  From this, I dug more deeply into the role of Vitamin D in human immunology - and health, more generally - and into nutrition and wellness, more broadly.

On the heels of the previous, Thomas Seyfried's "Cancer as a Metabolic Disease".  This is heavy going, and not for the faint of heart.  I am still not all the way through it.  I've heard that Travis Christofferson's "Tripping over the Truth" is more accessible, but I haven't tracked down a copy, yet - went right for the big guns!

Of late, much of my reading and learning is online - videos, webcasts, podcasts, Substacks and manifestos - though I still have stacks and stacks of books around, which I am reading, re-reading or which are still waiting in the wings to be read.  Much to my wife's chagrin (the clutter irritates her, but she still purports to love me)!  At least the digital stuff just fills up my head and hard drive, but doesn't clutter up the house.  One of these days, I ought to mass-produce a bajillion barrister's bookcases - so many projects...

That's probably a long enough litany, for now.  I'm sure there are many more, which will later come to mind, but this is a start.  I often entertain the notions of heterodox thinkers and heretics.  Sometimes, they change my mind.

Kevin Olson wrote:Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolution"

This was one of the ones that was on my pile of fundamental changes as well! I remain sort of mesmerized by the way the world changes at the point of revolution.

I will go back to an old  homesteading standard, Country Women.  I still pick it up and read it a couple of times a year.  I read it not so much for the information (much is out of date), but for the feeling I get from being allowed into people’s lives as they are challenged by the homesteading experience.  As the book begins, first there is the dream.

“The Forest People” by Colin Turnbull.

Kevin Olson wrote: D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's "On Growth and Form" is now somewhat deprecated, but is still absolutely enchanting, showing that simple mathematical (geometrical) transformations can alter one identifiable species of plant or animal into the shape of another.

This was also very helpful to me in discarding  my  formerly naïve use of Darwinism as a serious mechanism to explaining the world. He bridges the gap between Aristotle and Linnaeus.  It might have better been presented by Thompson in more than two volumes, rather than a beastly 1115 in two, but in any form it is a triumph.  

It is one of those books that set as monoliths in the field, while wildly discrediting the orthodox ideas of the field- like Newton's complete Principia, which destroys the idea of a universe organized by gravity, much to the befuddlement  of "educated" people who haven't read it.

Similarly, your reading of "The Transmission of Epidemic Influenza" by Edgar Hope-Simpson must have suggested that the orthodoxy of viral disease theory may have some serious defects that stem from false causation dating back to Ivanovsky?

I like your anti-orthodoxy slant, although we must disagree with the (illusionary) virtues of libertarianism,  especially as presented by the false conservative Heinlein.

What did you think of Cervantes? To me, he is the source of Western humor.

Take care,
Jeff

Hmmm.  I thought I'd replied to you, but it was "lost in the tabs" and I never sent it.  My apologies for being a poor interlocutor!

Jeff Lindsey wrote:This was also very helpful to me in discarding  my  formerly naïve use of Darwinism as a serious mechanism to explaining the world. He bridges the gap between Aristotle and Linnaeus.  It might have better been presented by Thompson in more than two volumes, rather than a beastly 1115 in two, but in any form it is a triumph.

And the formerly scorned Lamarckian evolution is now somewhat more highly esteemed, given our current understanding of epigenetics and what was formerly classified as "junk DNA".  Maybe some of the stuff really is deprecated left-overs from the past, or free riders inserted by naturally occurring gene transfer from micro-organisms, or whatever.  But I won't be surprised if we discover in the future that a lot of this encodes for a whole library of stuff, some of which doesn't often get referenced in a comfortably modern Western lifestyle, but comes in darned handy when life is a bit dicier.   And, I can now countenance that the downstream effects of some experiences may, in fact, be genetically, rather than strictly culturally, heritable.  That "somatic" changes could be inherited and would evidence in progeny -  say, becoming very metabolically thrifty, due to an episode of profound scarcity, appearing in descendants as an increased propensity to corpulence, or some such.

Jeff Lindsey wrote:
It is one of those books that set as monoliths in the field, while wildly discrediting the orthodox ideas of the field- like Newton's complete Principia, which destroys the idea of a universe organized by gravity, much to the befuddlement  of "educated" people who haven't read it.

I have to confess, I'm one of those who've never read Newton directly.  But, it sounds like one to put on the list.  And, is probably one of the things which can be stashed on the hard drive, rather than tripped over next to the bed (subsequently, I've now downloaded the 1846 Motte translation - do you have a preferred translation form the Latin?).  I am suspicious that the comparatively weak force of gravity is insufficient in the tenuous reaches of interstellar space to explain what we can observe, and I wonder if the electric universe folks aren't on to something.  For another thing to rattle the slats of physics, watch the videos of toy mechanical analog demonstrations of particle/wave systems from Yves Couder and Emmanuel Fort, which puts some meat on the bones of the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation of the equations of quantum mechanics.  I can't say who's "right" - and I don't have a dog in the fight - but these are some beautiful little experiments that might usefully inform ones intuition about the behaviors of wave/particle systems.  Whether or not quantum scale behavior resembles these macroscopic systems, they are mind-blowing demo toys.  But, these are two cases where my mind has been changed - or is at the very least, open to being changed - but I haven't read a book on either of them.

Jeff Lindsey wrote:Similarly, your reading of "The Transmission of Epidemic Influenza" by Edgar Hope-Simpson must have suggested that the orthodoxy of viral disease theory may have some serious defects that stem from false causation dating back to Ivanovsky?  

I am no expert in human immunology (I am barely a red neck mechanical engineer!), and I am now more agnostic than certain about the causative factors in human disease, but do I think that the "terrain" model certainly has more in its favor than I had originally appreciated.  Accordingly, I now take oral Vitamin D supplements at levels that would (and do!) horrify my GP and dermatologist, though are in line with published literature by those who specialize in the study of Vitamin D.  But, where I live, it's very cloudy during our wintry months (say, November through February or March, depending on the year), and we're north of 45 degrees, as well.  I probably ought to take at least some cod liver oil, rather than all synthetic supplements, maybe try to eat some sun-dried mushrooms, etc. to increase my natural sources of Vitamin D.  I have also altered (and, hopefully, improved) my diet considerably over the past few years.  As seems to be common, my dermatologist appears to be unable to distinguish between basal cell, squamous cell and melanoma cancer incidences correlated with sun exposure.  I now try to get as much sun exposure as I can without seriously pinking.

Jeff Lindsey wrote:I like your anti-orthodoxy slant, although we must disagree with the (illusionary) virtues of libertarianism,  especially as presented by the false conservative Heinlein.  

Well, I certainly didn't set out to be anti-orthodox, but I just kept find places where the orthodox opinions were lacking, and people outside the mainstream were making cogent counter-arguments, and the retorts of the mainstream were often ad hominem or were straw man attacks which didn't actually deal with the advocated positions.  I have libertarian leanings, mostly because I have seen what happens when power, money and influence are consolidated in the hands of a few, but am pretty conservative and conventional in my personal life choices, though open to intellectual engagement with ideas outside (sometimes, far outside) the mainstream.  I don't know what that makes me.  I never thought of Heinlein as particularly conservative in his writings (more libertarian, even libertine - poly-amorous matriarchies, anyone?), but he seemed pretty straight laced (from what I know of him) in his personal life.

Jeff Lindsey wrote:What did you think of Cervantes? To me, he is the source of Western humor.  

Alas, I have also never read Cervantes in the original (well, in a faithful translation - I don't think my Spanish is up to the task of appreciating literature, even if I can somewhat muddle through technical stuff), just condensed and abridged, which I am sure is a mere shadow.  No doubt reading Don Quixote in its entirety would improve my understanding of quixotic endeavors!  I have no opinion on whether he is the wellspring, as you assert, but it sounds like another to add to the reading list.

As I'd mentioned above, my mind has been changed on many things, but it many cases, and especially so of late, no books, per se, were involved.

Jeff Lindsey wrote:Take care,
Jeff  

And you, as well.
Kevin

Sticking with novels, The Secret Garden at age 10, set me on a couple of important paths, neither of which came to fruition until I was much older, but those seeds were planted, grew leaves, died back but never died fully and eventually grew and blossomed into aspects of who I am today.  And I'm not just talking about growing things here, and yes all the puns.

You want individual books? Umm Anne McCaffrey's Pern series has been a big influence.

Probably the biggest change has come from DARK GREEN MOUNTAIN SURVIVAL RESEARCH CENTRE by Ross Raven. Not really a book but as a collection of writings, he's been hugely influential in how I see the world.

Aside from that, all of these have influenced my thinking in some way. Although Goodkind may be leaving those shelves.

I used to be very competitive (mostly shooting and slow pitch softball). Maybe I still am competitive, but I don't actually compete anymore, but one of the books that fundamentally changed the way that I approach any task that I want to be great at was Lanny Bassham's "With Winning in Mind". One tidbit that really stick: He was an Olympic shooter who won a silver medal and lost to a Russian shooter. Where he was located, the only time he could get to a range to practice was at 3am. Every time his alarm went off to go practice and he turned it off to go back to bed, his wife would mutter "The Russian is practicing" and he would get up.

Jordan Peterson's "Twelve Rules for Life" also had a pretty profound effect on me and helped me to understand a lot about human nature and ways that we can better ourselves and the life of those around us.